Orange
- HEX
- #F07A1A
- RGB
- 240 122 26
- HSL
- 27° 88% 52%
- CMYK
- 0 49 89 6
Language
The fruit came first. Its name traveled from Sanskrit naranga through Persian and Arabic into French, losing its first n on the way. Before oranges reached England, people said geoluread, yellow-red, which is one reason a robin's breast and a fox's coat are still called red. The first record of orange as a color in English is from 1502, for clothes bought for Margaret Tudor.
Art
In Impression, Sunrise, Monet's orange sun is no brighter than the grey sky around it. Neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone showed that in a black-and-white photo the sun all but vanishes. Your color vision sees it blaze while your brightness vision barely registers it, so it seems to shimmer. Orange against blue-grey is the complementary pair at work.
Culture
The Dutch royal House of Orange took its name from a town in southern France, not the fruit. The story that Dutch growers bred orange carrots to honor William of Orange has no documents behind it, and orange carrots seem to predate him. Orange did become the Dutch national color, and fans still flood stadiums with it.
Design
The Golden Gate Bridge is painted International Orange. The US Navy wanted black and yellow stripes so ships could see it in fog. Consulting architect Irving Morrow fell for the red-orange primer on the steel and argued for it: warm against the hills, and still visible in the mist. See warm-and-cool.
History
Painters had no good pure orange until the 1800s. Medieval color theory barely treated orange as its own color: orange things were called red or yellow, which is why orange minium was 'red lead'. The Renaissance's one true orange pigment was realgar, a poisonous arsenic mineral Titian bought in Venice. Chrome orange, then cadmium orange, finally gave artists a strong, pure orange.
Symbolism
In India and Southeast Asia orange is a holy color, worn by Hindu ascetics and Buddhist monks. Their 'saffron' robes rarely saw saffron, which was far too costly: dyers used turmeric or, in Thailand, jackfruit heartwood.
Kin
- Blue: Its complementary opposite, the pair behind Monet's Impression, Sunrise
- Brown: Brown is dark orange, seen against brighter surroundings
- Red: Before the 1500s, English called orange things red or yellow-red
- Tangerine: Another color named after a citrus fruit, this one via Tangier
- Marigold: The orange flower of Mexico's Day of the Dead
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Orange (colour)' and 'Orange (word)', citing the OED for 1502
- Livingstone, Vision and Art (2002); Harvard Magazine, 'The Neurobiology of Art' (2003)
- Live Science, 'Are carrots orange because of a Dutch revolutionary?'
- NPR, 'The Golden Gate Bridge's accidental color' (2011)
- Ball, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour (2001)
- Jarman, Chroma (1994)
- St Clair, The Secret Lives of Colour (2016)
- Pastoureau, Yellow: The History of a Color (2019)
- Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette (2002)
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.